Analysis

posted on 22 August 2008 09:19

IBM is preparing to tell its customers to stop using tape and backup their data to cloud-based IBM Business Resilience data centers. It's spending $300 to build 13 such centers ($23 million per center) around the globe.

Customers will have a Service Delivery Platform in their data centers which automatically backs up data to an offsite IBM Business Resilience data center located in their part of the globe such as Hong Kong; Tokyo, Japan; Paris, France; London, UK; Beijing and Shanghai, China; Izmir, Turkey; Warsaw, Poland; Milan, Italy; Metro Park, New Jersey; Cologne, Germany; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Mumbai, India; South Africa; and Brussels, Belgium.

The USA seems under-served though, with just one Business Resilience data center. All is not what it seems.

The services are based on IBM rack-mount storage appliances - whatever they are and you'll look in vain inside IBM's web pages for details - and software and technology from Arsenal Digital Solutions which IBM bought in December last year. Arsenal had 67 data centers, many in the USA, in which it stored 20PB of customer data. IBM now owns the lot.

It is calling its new backup to cloud disk offering IBM Information Protection Services. The combination of the IBM strage appliances and Arsenal's software is called a Data Protection Vault.

Business customers will be able to store and retrieve backed up information from their vault in thecloud for purposes of file restoration, general business continuance, compliance audits and disaster recovery. Data can be restored to the originating site or an alternate one. There will be a pay-as-you-go subscription service.

This infrastructure build out parallel's EMC's Fortress offering and will also parallel Symantec's S4 service.

A message behind the message is that data protection generally is moving away from tape (See IBM white paper). There is no place for Earth-bound tape in the cloud where disk rules, ok, and the new acronym is D2CD - disk-to-cloud-disk.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}